by Mike Carey
‘From a safe distance?’ McClennan echoed me. ‘How would that work?’
But Jenna-Jane was already shaking her head, very firmly. ‘We go ahead with the plan as agreed,’ she said.
‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘Why take the risk?’
‘Because we’re scientists,’ she said simply. ‘We gather data and then we reach conclusions based on that data. We don’t prejudge, however tempting a particular prefabricated theory may be. By all means proceed with your own plans too. If Gilbert’s team doesn’t succeed tonight, you can try your alternative method. I see no harm in that - in having two strings to our bow.’
‘The harm is that your first string might snap and put someone’s eye out,’ I said caustically. ‘You’re sending your people into a dangerous situation when there’s no need.’
I looked to McClennan for support, but J-J’s rationalist call to arms had stiffened his sinews. ‘I think the team I’ve put together will be up to the job,’ he said, toeing the company line. ‘You can tell me what your back-up plan is, if you want to. If I think it’s got any merit, I’ll put someone on it.’
There was a dead silence. Both of them looked at me expectantly. All I could think of was to quote Gil’s own words back at him, like a snot-nosed schoolkid doing dumb insolence.
‘Well maybe I’ll brief you later,’ I said. ‘If you need to hear it.’
Nobody was going to give me any exit music, so I just left. Jenna-Jane called out something to me, but I was already halfway down the corridor and I didn’t hear it.
Trudie Pax was loitering by the lifts, leaning against the wall with her arms folded and a grim look on her face. She straightened as I approached. ‘I have to get out of here,’ she said.
‘I thought you were on map duty,’ I reminded her.
‘I’ll come back later. Right now I need the air.’
‘When you go back,’ I said, ‘take this with you.’ I handed her the package and she hefted it, feeling its weight.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘A photo of Rafi. Take a look.’
She tore away the paper from one corner and examined the contents of the package without enthusiasm.
‘I’ve seen this technique before,’ she said. ‘The photo was developed right onto the glass, right?’
‘Printed onto the glass,’ I corrected her. ‘Right. It was all the rage back in the Victorian era. But apparently Macedonia gets the fashions late.’
‘So is the picture significant in some way?’
I see-sawed my hand. ‘Maybe. Maybe not. It was Rafi’s first communion. Big day for most Catholic kids, right? A lot of emotion invested, a lot of vivid memories laid down. I thought it might give you another focus, if you need one.’
Trudie didn’t seem impressed. ‘It’s a lot older than the fingernail.’
‘I know. Look, try it if you think you need it. Otherwise don’t. And either way give it back to me when you’re done. I’ll give it to Pen for a keepsake.’
I shied away from the implications of that statement: that whether Asmodeus won or lost, keeping Rafi alive might turn out to be a trick outside our collective skills; that the photo might turn out to be the last thing Pen had to remember her former lover by.
‘I’ll try it,’ Trudie promised. ‘I’ll put it back in the map room now and feed it into the loop later on.’
‘Later on? Why not now?’
‘Because if you’re going to go down to Holborn and look for Asmodeus’ rabbit hole, I’d like to join you.’
I tried the idea on for size, and found I hated it less than I would have expected. ‘I’ve got something else I need to do first,’ I warned her.
Pax seemed nonplussed. ‘Something more important than Asmodeus?’
‘No, less important. A lot less. It’s just . . .’ I threw up my hands in a shrug, found that I had to unclench them in order to do it. I hadn’t realised how angry and frustrated I was until that moment. I almost punched the wall, but my left hand was still stiff and sore from punching Gil McClennan’s jaw exactly twenty-four hours before. ‘Super-Self,’ I exploded. ‘Fucking Super-Self. Jenna-Jane is determined to send in the troops, even though they don’t have a blind clue what it is they’re facing. She thinks blitzkrieg is the right answer no matter what the question is. No, actually it’s worse than that: she thinks the data you get from a wipe-out are as good as any other kind. If some of Gil’s people die in the process, or get their brains fried like Etheridge, well, what the fuck? Science marches on.’
Pax was giving me a curious look. I threw it right back at her. ‘What?’ I demanded.
She shook her head. ‘Nothing. It’s just . . . do you think it will help?’
‘Help what? What are you talking about?’
Trudie looked as though she was picking her words with care. ‘The MOU exorcists aren’t your favourite people in the world, are they? They’re as bad as the Anathemata, in your book.’
‘So?’
‘So why does any of this matter to you? If you save some bunch of people you don’t really know and don’t really care about, is that going to make you feel any better about letting Asmodeus get free and kill somebody you did care about? Because that’s what this is about, isn’t it? The redemption train. You’re standing on the footplate and sounding the whistle, Castor.’
‘The whistle’s all I’ve got,’ I muttered sourly as I punched the button for the lift. ‘Don’t knock it.’
I never did like being psychoanalysed, even before I grew up, read the literature and realised that Freud only got into that game to pick up girls. Maybe that was why I asked Trudie to cover for me on the Holborn beat while I went across town to see a woman about a tune. Or maybe I was still reluctant to trust her further than I had to, even though we were de facto partners now. She was still Anathemata on some level: still fighting the same war against the same enemies. It felt like all there could ever be between us was a truce. I arranged to meet her in an hour’s time, at Seven Dials, and headed west.
On one level I was close to screaming in frustration. Asmodeus had fallen off the map after his second visit to Pen’s house, the night before last, when he’d left me a knife and a neatly bisected button to remember him by. He was still out there somewhere, still working, and I didn’t even know what it was he was working towards. Just that it involved the deaths of everyone Rafi had ever known, that I couldn’t possibly stop that from happening, and - hardest to take of all - that those deaths would turn out to be some sort of horrendous fringe benefit. They weren’t the point. They arose out of some bigger scheme that Asmodeus had cooking.
Maybe his priorities were the same as they’d always been. ‘I’m thinking of going home for a while,’ the demon had told me, ‘when I’m free of this meat.’ He wanted to scrape Rafi off his shoe and rise in all his splendour, one hundred per cent guaranteed Hell-spawn: that had been on his mind ever since I’d inadvertently trapped him. So was that the big plan now?
He’d gone to the satanists first, but they’d let him down. The Anathemata had broken up the party before the mages of the SCA could complete their rituals and tear the man and the demon from their non-consensual embrace. Plan B had to be under way by now. Asmodeus wouldn’t stop because he’d been put down once; he’d just come back again harder than ever.
And now, when we were finally closing in on the brimstone-arsed bastard, I was trudging halfway across London on a different job entirely, working to an agenda set by Jenna-Jane Mulbridge. That zombie in Somers Town had been right, and so had old Rosie: the world had changed all right. It had shaken itself inside out and all of us who thought we had the high ground were living in the valley of the shadow. What goes around, comes around, and it turns out to be a chainsaw blade.
In Kensington Church Street, I gave Evelyn Caldessa the schematics I’d sketched out on the train, and asked her if what I wanted could even be done. Caldessa is an antique dealer, and a good friend of mine ever since she helped me out on the Abbie Torringt
on case. She’s imperturbable normally, having seen so much crazy shit in her seventy-four years that nothing surprises her any more. This commission made her raise an eyebrow though.
‘Well there’s no reason why not, in theory,’ she said, after scanning the sheets several times over, tracing the lines with her stick-like finger as she puzzled out the sequence. But despite that hopeful start, she shook her head dubiously.
‘In practice?’ I prompted.
Caldessa glanced across at her only other customer, a middle-aged man in a three-quarter-length fawn coat who was ogling a case full of porcelain shepherdesses with the furtive air of a punter in a porn shop. She clearly had some hopes that he was going to make a purchase; either that or she thought he might have sticky fingers.
‘None of the standard designs would work,’ she said. ‘They have a very tiny range, because the mechanism is very small and very crude. So you want something bespoke . . .’
‘I’m prepared to pay,’ I said, four words that have a magical effect in a lot of situations.
‘. . . but you want it done quickly. Bespoke and quick turnaround don’t sit well in the same sentence, dear heart. The people who I could ask to do this would enjoy the challenge, but they’d want to take weeks over it and charge you thousands.’
‘Okay,’ I said, rubbing my chin ruefully. ‘I thought I was prepared to pay, but it turns out I’m not. I can’t raise that kind of money, Evelyn. And the time won’t shift. If I can’t have it today, there’s no point having it at all. Tell me if there’s another way.’
‘Those items,’ Caldessa said, not to me but to the well-dressed shepherdess-fancier, ‘are part of a collection. I’m afraid I can’t split them up.’
Turning back to me, she winked conspiratorially. ‘Never make it too easy for them,’ she murmured. ‘Obsession thrives on surmountable obstacles. Yes, Felix, there is another way. Several movements set side by side in one casing would do the job. Each mechanism would still be in the standard range, but together they’d be able to do what you need them to do. What a job though! Not making the individual cylinders - that’s no effort at all. But making them work in time with each other . . .’
‘If you could do it,’ I said, ‘how much would it cost?’
She gave me a slightly surprised look. ‘Oh, more than you could afford, my lamb. A lot more than you could afford. But I assume there’s a story attached?’
‘Yeah, there is. Very much so.’
‘And I’d very much like to hear it.’
‘Done.’
‘I’d very much like to hear it at Claridge’s. Gastronomy Domine says Gordon Ramsay is back on form this year. A coarse and odious little man, but he knows how to cook.’
‘Cheap at the price, Evelyn.’
‘Then I’ll see what I can do. Keep your mobile phone on vibrate, Felix, and in your back pocket. When I goose you, you’ll know it’s time to come see me again.’
From Kensington I grabbed a number 14 bus back into town: not as quick as a cab but cheaper. Now that I was committed to dinner for two at Claridge’s, I was already counting the pennies.
Having Caldessa on the case gave me a sense of having made some progress, maybe spurious, but when your own wheels are spinning in the air it helps to know that other people are moving. In that regard, I called Nicky and asked him about the three stooges known as Tlallik, Ket and Jetaniul.
‘A couple more bites,’ he said. ‘One on Jetaniul this time, and one more on Tlallik. The references are really fucking old, like with the Grazimir citation. Again, just lists of names from a couple of early grimoires: translations of translations of translations, so far from the original context that it’s not worth chasing up. Nothing to indicate who they are, or what they are, or what they do. Judging by the company they keep though, they were pretty big players at one time. Which makes me wonder how come none of them stayed in the hit parade after the thirteenth century.’
‘And no known aliases?’
‘Not yet. I tell you what though: Juliet could ask her brother.’
‘Say again?’
‘She comes from Baphomet’s lineage, doesn’t she? She is of Baphomet the sister, and the youngest of her line, et cetera. His name turns up on one of these lists too, so maybe him and Tlallik ran in the same crew.’
‘I don’t think she phones home all that often,’ I said. It was an automatic response, dating back to when Juliet was trying to keep her nose clean. After last night’s performance, maybe I’d need to revise that estimate.
‘Doesn’t hurt to ask, anyway,’ Nicky said. ‘I’m still on it, but I’m thinking this is a waste of time. These guys all closed up shop a long time ago.’
‘Do demons retire, Nicky?’
‘You can run that one past her too.’
I got off the bus at Trafalgar Square, then walked up St Martin’s Lane, where I found a bank and wired a ton, in pounds sterling, to the personal account of D. Anastasiadis. A hundred quid a book, he’d said, so now he could make a start on Rafi’s journals if he hadn’t done so already. If you’d asked me what I hoped to find in there, and what I thought I could do with it, I’d have had to admit I had no idea. Again, it was the illusion of moving forward that was comforting, even though forward doesn’t really mean anything if you have no clue where it is you’re going.
As I carried on towards Seven Dials and my rendezvous with Trudie Pax, I made one final call, to Juliet - or as it turned out, to Sue Book. She sounded scared and hunted, as though picking up the phone was an act that was fraught with danger. I asked her if Juliet had seemed okay when she got home last night.
‘Last night?’ Sue echoed, sounding uncertain. ‘She wasn’t here. She didn’t . . . I thought . . .’ There was a pause, and then the sound of another voice in the background. Sue answered the other person, but her voice was muffled now - a hand over the receiver, most probably.
‘Sue?’ I prompted.
There was a spate of rattles and clicks.
‘Who is this?’ It wasn’t Sue’s voice. It wasn’t Juliet’s either - or rather, not quite. It was close, but it had a ragged edge to it with oddly placed peaks and troughs, as though it was being played back on the wrong device and in the wrong format.
‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Castor.’
‘She called you?’
The threat in the tone was palpable. ‘Uh . . . no. I called her. I just wanted to see how you were feeling. If you’re managing to . . .’ I groped for a circumlocution that avoided words like devour and soul. ‘If you’re keeping it together,’ I finished cravenly.
There was a long silence, long enough to make me think that the connection had broken, but Juliet spoke again just before I did.
‘Tell me where you are,’ she said.
From behind her, I could dimly hear a squeal of dismay from Sue. ‘Jules, no. He’s just a friend. He’s your friend too. It’s not—’
The crash that obliterated the end of the sentence was loud enough to make me flinch away from the phone. ‘Juliet,’ I shouted. ‘Don’t hurt her. Fuck it, don’t hurt her. I’m in town. On Seven Dials. What do you want?’
At that moment Trudie rounded the corner of Shorts Gardens, about fifty yards away. She waved to me, then registered my expression and lowered her hand. Only silence now on the other end of the line.
‘Juliet?’ I yelled again.
There’s a weird experience I get every now and then, where I look at my watch and I think it’s stopped, because the second hand doesn’t seem to be moving. It just sits there, seemingly for a whole lot longer than a second hand should, until finally it wakes up and jumps to the next notch. It’s just a second, but it’s a second you’re glancing at sideways somehow, and from that angle it looks longer. That’s probably what happened here. It felt like I was waiting for a night and a day, but since nothing else happened in that time, it’s a fair bet that it was no time at all.
‘She’s fine, Castor,’ said Juliet in her normal voice.
‘What
do you mean, she’s fine?’ I snarled. ‘I heard you tearing the whole place apart.’
Her voice was eerily calm, and the dislocation from what had just happened was so complete it was terrifying. ‘I swung a chair against the wall, and it broke. Sue wasn’t hurt. But now she won’t let me touch her or come near her. Can I ask a favour?’
Trudie had come up to join me now, and was waiting silently at my side, trying to piece together what the hell this was about from my side of the conversation. ‘A favour?’ I repeated blankly.
‘I told you I’d send her away if I thought I might hurt her again.’ A pause. ‘She can’t stay here.’
‘I’ll be right there,’ I said. ‘Don’t either of you move.’ Inspiration struck, and I added, ‘Give Sue the phone.’ I looked around for a cab, but there were none in sight. I started walking rapidly along Mercer Street with Trudie in tow. I’d reached the end of the street before Sue’s voice sounded down the line again, breaking even on the single word ‘Hello?’
Plenty of cabs on Shaftesbury Avenue. I flagged one down with my right hand, holding the phone in my left.
‘I’m going to put a friend on,’ I said to Sue as we climbed into the cab. ‘Keep talking to her. Let her know if anything happens.’ I passed the phone to Trudie, adding ‘Royal Oak’ for the cabbie’s benefit, and we were away.
Thanks to Mr Livingstone and his wondrous congestion charge, we made good headway through the centre, but then got hopelessly snarled up as we headed up Edgware Road toward the Westway. Trudie was keeping up a non-stop stream of meaningless conversation with Sue Book the whole way, which was what I was hoping she’d do: taking Sue’s mind off the terror and at the same time letting me know that she was still alive. I sat with my eyes closed, thinking about Juliet, or rather thinking about the tune that corresponded to Juliet. If I had to fight her, I needed to have that music clear in my mind, and at the moment it was rubbing shoulders with other tunes, to their mutual detriment. I had to unremember the harsh skirls of the fear-thing in the Super-Self swimming pool and the insidious discontinuities of Asmodeus, had to put them way to the back of my mind where they couldn’t be heard.